Carrefour coming to Karachi!!!

Carrefour, an international chain of low price supermarkets is coming to Karachi. According to my info, they plan to set up 5-6 hypermarts in karachi.

The Carrefour busniess model is very simple, they buy enough bulk to sell it cheaper than the market. So if your local grocery store seels you your typical bar of soap for about Rs. 22, they might sell the same for Rs. 20.

Another very promising area of activity is the promotion of smaller industries. Carrefour tends to stock many products at lower prices under its own brand.

The Carrefour coming to Karachi is a big relief to its tired populace, indeed. The idea is to shop for the whole month’s need in one go at a same place.

I had few chances to shop at this big store in Kuala Lumpur, the variety there enticed me to shop a lot. But the bigger picture remains to be seen, there it had normally 4-8 floors of parking lot under the shopping plaza with SmartTags or Parking Coupon System (quite common in DEVELOPED :( cities around the globe).

Yet, I feel if Carrefour ventures into Karachi, our retailers would get a new meaning of marketing, at least.

This is great for consumers like us, but if they are anything like Walmart in the US, than smaller stores/other retailers will hate them since Carrefour will drive them out of business.

Here in the US, wherever Wal-mart (which is the largest hypermarket in the US) comes to a small town, it wipes out all the local businessmen since it can afford to price items less than anyone else. This creates unemployment which gradually leads these former store-owners to end up working for Wal-mart at low wages and no benefits, but there is nothing they can do since Wal-mart is the omnipresent monopoly.

Thats really thoughtfull scene. If carefours business model is implemented (by any1) it is a win-win situation for consumer. But as u rightly said it will throw retailers out. No one would be willing to pay higher once they can get it for less.
How this could be balanced?

Unfortunately there is not too much you can do in a capitalistic economy — and there’s not a whole lot that can be done here in the US either.

The only way local store owners can keep Walmart at bay is by lobbying their local city government to not issue building permits to Walmart or restrict them by changing zoning regulations (eg. stores large than X sq feet cannot be built within a 20 mile radius of residential neighborhoods).

Since Wal-mart has so much money they can easily sway city governments with grants etc.

As a result local businessmen and poorly paid employees have to turn to government welfare eg. Social Security or unemployment benefits. These don’t exist in Pakistan so we’ll have to wait and see what happens there.

Danny, the Walmart business model may drive deserving people out in an economy like USA. Over here in Pakistan, every shopkeeper is involved in fleecing customers, and prices his goods way above the real price. I think what our Pakistani market needs is a jolt which brings them back to their senses. However, Carrefour is not as aggresive in all this low pricing and driving retailers out. At least this is what I have observed in Dubai.

I wish it was Walmart that was coming here, not Carrefour. These Karachi shopkeepers need to have some sense knocked into them.